Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Historical Studies of Urban America)

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In 1997, after General Motors shuttered a massive complex of factories in the gritty industrial city of Flint, Michigan, signs were placed around the empty facility reading, “Demolition Means Progress,” suggesting that the struggling metropolis could not move forward to greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball. A lot more than a trite corporate slogan, the phrase encapsulates the operating ethos of the nation’s metropolitan leadership from no less than the 1930s to the present. All through, the leaders of Flint and other municipalities time and again tried to revitalize their communities by demolishing outdated and inefficient structures and institutions and overseeing a large number of urban renewal campaigns—many of which yielded only more impoverished and more divided metropolises. After decades of these efforts, the morning time of the twenty-first century found Flint probably the most racially segregated and economically polarized metropolitan areas in the nation.

In probably the most comprehensive works yet written on the history of inequality and metropolitan development in modern The us, Andrew R. Highsmith uses the case of Flint to provide an explanation for how the perennial quest for urban renewal—even more than white flight, corporate abandonment, and other forces—contributed to mass suburbanization, racial and economic division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom about structural inequality and the roots of the nation’s “urban crisis,” Demolition Means Progress shows in vivid detail how public policies and programs designed to revitalize the Flint area in the end led to the hardening of social divisions.

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